Departure
96%
vs 95% ▲ 1
MY FS FLIGHTS
MY FS FLIGHTS
New Chitose Airport is the principal gateway to Sapporo and the largest airport in Hokkaido, sited a short distance south-southeast of the town of Chitose and sharing its airspace with the adjacent Chitose Air Base. For the simulator pilot it offers a busy, four-runway commercial environment with full ILS coverage, round-the-clock scheduling limits, and the added interest of mixed civil and Japan Air Self-Defense Force operations.
New Chitose Airport (ICAO RJCC, IATA CTS) serves the Sapporo metropolitan area from a site near the town of Chitose in Hokkaido, and is operated by Hokkaido Airports Ltd. It is Hokkaido's largest airport by both traffic and land area, handling domestic services alongside a growing international programme, and sits immediately next to Chitose Air Base, a Japan Air Self-Defense Force station operating F-15 Eagle fighters and the Japanese government's VIP aircraft. For a virtual pilot the field is notable for its scale, its four parallel-style runways with instrument approaches, and the operational quirk of sharing air traffic control with an active military base.
The airport lies at coordinates 42.7753N, 141.693E at an elevation of 69 feet, about 2.7 nautical miles south-southeast of Chitose and close to Tomakomai, Hokkaido. It is directly adjacent to Chitose Air Base, with which it shares interconnecting taxiways and, at times, air traffic control; the military base's runways are occasionally used to relieve New Chitose during winter weather closures. This close military-civil relationship shapes the surrounding airspace and daily traffic flow.
New Chitose has four physical runways. The longest, 18L/36R, is a hard-surfaced, lit strip of 13,100 feet on the 36R threshold and 9,820 feet on the 18L threshold. A second pair, 18R/36L, is 8,822 feet, hard-surfaced and lit. The two remaining parallel runways are equipped with ILS: 01L/19R, at 9,804 feet, hard-surfaced and lit with ILS on both 01L and 19R, and 01R/19L, at 9,794 feet, hard-surfaced and lit with ILS on both 01R and 19L.
New Chitose Approach operates on 120.1 MHz, with Departure on 124.7 MHz and a further control frequency, TCA, on 127.7 MHz. Chitose Tower works on 118.8 MHz, Ground on 121.6 MHz, and Clearance Delivery on 121.9 MHz. ATIS is broadcast on 128.6 MHz. Instrument approaches are available to runways 01L and 01R, with ILS frequencies of 110.9 MHz for 01L and 110.75 MHz for 01R.
Because New Chitose shares its airspace and air traffic control with Chitose Air Base, daytime civil operations are capped at 32 takeoffs and landings per hour. Operations by certain foreign-registered aircraft, including Chinese and Russian aircraft, are prohibited on Mondays and Thursdays. International flights are further restricted to specific windows: Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 12:00 and 16:00, and from 17:00 on Fridays through 23:59 on Sundays, reflecting the need to avoid interference with adjacent military flying.
New Chitose Airport opened on 20 July 1988, replacing the adjoining Chitose Airport, a joint civil-military facility that had handled passenger flights since 1963. It became Japan's first 24-hour airport in 1994, though night services between 22:00 and 07:00 remain limited to six flights a day for noise reasons, split between Tokyo passenger services and cargo operations. The airport has at various times hosted long-haul international routes, including Amsterdam with KLM from 1997 to 2002, Cairns with Qantas across 1992 to 1998 and again 2004 to 2007, and Honolulu, first with JALWays from 1992 to 2003 and later with Hawaiian Airlines from 2012. A weekly Finnair service to Helsinki launched in December 2019 but was withdrawn during the COVID-19 pandemic. The airport's facilities were upgraded with a new VIP lounge for the 34th G8 summit held in Hokkaido in 2008, and a second terminal, roughly doubling capacity and used for international flights, was completed by August 2019.
New Chitose remains one of Japan's few 24-hour airports, though scheduling is constrained overnight and by the shared-airspace arrangement with Chitose Air Base described above. It is a focus city for All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines and an operating base for Air Do and Skymark Airlines, and the Sapporo-Tokyo Haneda route it serves is among the busiest air routes in the world. The airport has been recognised for rapid service improvements, rising in the Skytrax world airport rankings to 49th in 2024 after being named the year's most improved airport.